Katie Zacharia and the telling of lies

U.S. President Donald Trump’s new press secretary made her debut last week and was almost universally panned and parodied, lasting just five days before being fired.

No surprise there — it’s one of the most glaring spotlights on the planet and Katie Zacharia had a tough act to follow in Karoline Leavitt, who — as I noted in an earlier column — truly put the “pro” in propaganda.

Even Leavitt — skilled as she is — couldn’t persuade the public that she was leaving the high-pressure post on Aug. 27 to spend more time with her family. She’ll be back hammering Trump’s message home through Fox News as an on-air contributor starting Nov. 1. Fox, of course, is Zacharia’s old stomping grounds, where she often offered her views as an attorney, which she is not, though she played one many times on TV.

Predictably, since she’s a woman, the parodists on social media — both professional and amateur — were quick to mock Zacharia’s appearance (flawless hair, teeth, clothing) and delivery during her excruciating, 14-minute inaugural press briefing on Oct. 13.

Excruciating, because Zacharia was noticeably nervous (and who but perhaps Karoline Leavitt wouldn’t be?) and clunky in delivering the latest litany of Trump’s achievements. She often had her head down, reading haltingly from notes, and referred to “my president,” when she meant “my husband.” Zacharia also spoke of her devotion to her four young children, noting that, “When I started working again, I was able to integrate them into my life.” (Cue the thunderous applause.)

But it wasn’t her appearance or her delivery that led to her ouster. As an anxious public speaker myself, I empathized with her jitters. Her performance would likely have improved with time. In fact, she sounded noticeably more articulate in front of the friendly cameras at Fox News just a couple of days later.

What was most telling was that a common theme of the critiques of Zacharia’s performance was the observation that she is not a good enough liar.

I don’t mean she’s not the kind of person you’d want at a poker game. I’m talking about the fact that she was disparaged for not having the ability to lie smoothly, convincingly and with conviction about the matters of international importance that she could have been asked about: the war in Iran; whether or not the United States has stopped sharing intel with Ukraine (a question she deflected); the U.S. administration’s decision to buy diesel from Russia; its fractious trade relationship with Canada; the executions of American citizens by ICE agents, and so on.

Now, Zacharia is no stranger to untruths. She has passed herself off countless times as a lawyer when she isn’t one — she has a law degree but has never passed a bar exam. She has spread conspiracy theories with impunity, once claiming in an interview that “(t)he abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the extermination camps in Nazi Germany to stop the progesterone from flowing and cut off the oxygen to the baby, right?” (Wrong. The abortion pill, mifepristone, is a synthetic steroid developed in France and introduced in the 1980s. Zyklon B, used by Nazis in concentration camps, is a cyanide-based pesticide.)

Still, she was summarily dismissed as a lightweight when it comes to spreading false information.

Speaking to CNN last week, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci put it bluntly:

“One of the things you have to do in that job is you have to be a machine-gun liar. And it doesn’t look like this woman, Katie Zacharia, is up for that. I mean, you got to sit there and you got to get four Pinocchios every day from the Washington Post and you got to do it in rapid succession, and she doesn’t look prepared to do that.” (Scaramucci was referring to the rating system used by the Washington Post’s factchecker, in which four Pinocchios represents the most egregious of lies.)

So, there we have it. Not only have we entered a bizarro world in which government propagandists are expected to be able to lie with all the slickness of a sideshow carnie (and this is nothing new; consider the Nazis’ extreme bold-facedness in referring to Joseph Goebbels as their minister of propaganda and “public enlightenment”), but now it has been unabashedly named and demanded as a prerequisite for those pushing the falsehoods of the most powerful person in the world.

“You gotta have mendacity in your spirit to work for Donald Trump in that position,” Scaramucci said. “You gotta be willing to lie with great enthusiasm.”

Without doubt, Karoline Leavitt took political spin to a whole new level. I guess this was just another bar Zacharia was unable to pass.

Pam Frampton lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com